CFD Analysis of Thermal Mixing and Mass Flux Distribution in the PWR After MSLB

Abstract

During a postulated main steam line break (MSLB) event of a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR) initiated at the Hot Zero Power (HZP) condition, increased heat removal from the broken steam generator (SG) on the secondary side that significantly reduces the coolant temperature on the primary side, and cold primary coolant enters the reactor vessel through the affected loop resulting in asymmetric temperature and mass flux distributions into the reactor core. A plant safety analysis under the MSLB condition needs to account for the thermal and mass flux asymmetry effects on the reactor core response due to the colder water flowing from the affected SG and the reactor coolant system (RCS) to reactor vessel. High resolution computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methodology with ANSYS CFX (Version 16.1) software was applied to analyze the flow behaviors and thermal-hydraulic phenomena and to study the thermal mixing and asymmetry effects in the downcomer and lower-plenum of a typical Westinghouse design four-loop PWR under the MSLB conditions. Two scenarios were considered for the CFD simulation distinct by reactor coolant pump status: (1) Low-flow case: without offsite power where the reactor core is cooled through natural circulation (2) High-flow case: with offsite power available and the reactor coolant pumps in operation The CFX CFD modeling and simulation were based on the reactor vessel boundary conditions from a system code transient simulation at the limiting time steps with respect to thermal margin of the fuel design. The geometric model included the vessel downcomer and the lower internals up to the reactor core inlet below the fuel assemblies. The results of CFD simulation show the different flow patterns and temperature distributions at the reactor core inlet for the low-flow case and for the high-flow case. Thermal asymmetric effect exists in both cases, but in the low-flow case, cold flow enters into core inlets at the opposite side of faulted loop located, and in the high-flow case cold flow enters into core inlets at the same side of faulted loop located. A mass flux asymmetric effect exists in both cases, but for the low-flow case, the core inlet mass flow distribution is more uniform than that for the high-flow case. The reactor core inlet distributions under the MSLB condition were further evaluated through comparisons with the results from the STAR-CCM+ (Version 10.04.01) CFD modeling and simulation. The evaluation showed that the simulation results are in good agreement with the STAR-CCM+ predictions and consistent with the phenomenon observed in an experiment published in open literature and site engineer judgment based on the available detected data.